


Born of the Sun and adopted by the Dark

by Ellinor



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bullying, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Julia Montauk, Child Neglect, Cults, Dark Avatar Julia Montauk, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25781749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellinor/pseuds/Ellinor
Summary: Children tend to have strange interactions when faced head on with manifestations of entities. Well, at least those not completely full of bloodlust or deprived of morals.The thing sent to kill the Montauk family encounters Julia Montauk first, and the little seven year old asks to play. Who could resist that?
Comments: 9
Kudos: 29
Collections: TMA Girls Week





	Born of the Sun and adopted by the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> I'm weak for dangerous killing monsters just looking at a child and being like Oh. Baby? and adopting/protecting it. 
> 
> Alcoholism warning for Robert Montauk, just a little mention.
> 
> This is for TMA girls week for the entity swap!!!

Julia Montauk at age eight did not have trouble sleeping, no matter how tired or grumpy she was in the mornings. She was snuggled in her blanket, head against the pillow, arms squeezing around her plush dog, a ratty brown and white thing, her eyes wide open.

Julia didn’t know it, but her eyes shone in the dark, and they had for the past few months. No one else knew this either, and if her parents did know, they would have been far more careful about protecting their home. 

But they didn’t know, and so Julia had eyes that shone with a faint grey reflection, a telltale sign of a nocturnal creature. She was not the only creature lurking in this house.

Hence why Julia’s eyes were open, her mouth pouting with concentration, and she huffed with frustration when the shadowed manifestation just appeared in her room, with no discernible difference between it being there and not. Julia wanted to see when her friend showed up, but it was almost impossible, and it had become one of their many games, to see if Julia saw it before it saw her. She had gotten better at seeing it through this, so Julia figured it was just one of those games where you were tricked into learning too.

Julia smiled though, baring teeth in an imitation of the creature in front of her, and Julia rolled out of her bed, ready to play more games.

Julia did not have trouble sleeping because she gradually needed less and less of it. But at first that was not the case, and she simply stayed up later in order to play with her imaginary guardian. 

-

The Thing From The Darkness had been sent by an avatar of its entity on a simple mission- to take the daughter of an ex-faithful of The Dark, and then kill the ex-faithful and her partner. It was almost insultingly easy, the one protection left from The Dark was the pendant on the ex-faithful’s neck to mark her as protected (but in this case merely was a beacon and shield, inert as soon as it left her delicate throat). 

Nothing protected the home or the family, nothing marked or claimed the place to turn it into a sanctuary, and so it entered easily, dimming any source of light into the darkness from whence it came as soon as it approached. The house was engulfed in darkness, a void of nothingness and everythingness that flowed, pressing and impossible on those afraid, but silken and nourishing to those who were feared. And it was most definitely feared. It could feel fear pouring from the ex-faithful, and it drank from that endless fountain. 

If it were human, it would’ve likened the concoction of fear and dread to black coffee, bitter and hot enough to sear away any feeling or taste on the tongue. But it was not human, it didn't know the small nuances of modern life, it just knew fear and connection and The Dark and what other forces out there are worth avoiding. It was not the apex predator. It was brought here and bound to a task by a leader of The Dark’s faithful, and it would return to The Dark once its task was finished.

It rarely bothered to understand much about humanity, aside from what instilled that deep gut wrenching and mind breaking fear that it could consume. It knew about children though. Small humans who always feared The Dark in all forms, who were weaknesses to exploit in any adult humans around them. They were fragile, but always managed to recover and grow again no matter what fear, only for the fear to set so deep in them it took the sharpest of claws to manipulate that fear just so, leaving them an open pouring wound of terror.

It was sent to destroy the ex-faithful. It would do so easily by taking the ex-faithful’s beloved daughter, or so it thought.

But it entered a house engulfed in darkness, and did not find a child that was protected and loved, not to the full extent the child should have been.  
The girl was small and tired, smaller than it would have expected, and the girl was wandering downstairs while her parents were sleeping peacefully upstairs, though the ex-faithful was beginning to stir. 

The girl was looking at the open door where it stood, curiosity to rival The Eye dripping off of her instead of the steady rivulets of fear the monster sent to kill her expected.

She sat down, knees bent and legs crossed, and held out her toy, silently asking if this monstrous Thing of The Dark Itself would like to play. 

Stunned, with a curiosity of its own, the monster sank down into the floor, a puddle of darkness with nothing to cast a shadow settling around it, and it dulled its claws, and gently pet the toy approximation of a dog.

The child and the monster sat like that for hours, the child not knowing that her mother was twitching and whimpering with horrific nightmares just a floor above her, a pendant burning cold on her skin.

Julia was excited, speaking in loud whispers and telling all about her day and the movies her mom said they would go see soon and her projects at school. Every once in a while when she talked about school she would frown and a simple childish sadness slipped out, distasteful and distressing.

The monster managed to communicate, generally just pushing things it would typically manipulate to cause fear into words or concepts or pictures, slipping them into the girl’s head and she was too tired to question this was anything other than a dream or a strange imaginary friend. 

Julia eventually nodded off, slumping onto the ground, thumb in her mouth, other hand loosely gripping her plush dog, the toy itself half submerged into the puddle of darkness at the monster’s waist where it had sunk into the floor. The monster frowned. It was fairly certain children slept in beds, not on kitchen floors. It knew the two adults were upstairs, and to get any closer might wake them, especially the ex-faithful. Instead the monster reformed itself and stood, picking up the frail child, unintentionally marking it with protection as it did so, and settled her on the soft worn sofa, pulling the quilt hanging from the furniture’s back and slowly draping it over the child.

The next morning Julia’s mother awoke with a dry silent scream lodged in her throat, the icy grip of her old god clawing at her heart and stilling any breath in her lungs. Fear sunk low into her stomach and nested there, and Linette Montauk woke her husband, and told him that they had run out of time.

It was then, when Julia was just seven years old, that her father began to work the night shift as a police officer, and the shed her parents would work on ‘adult projects’ gained a heavy padlock. 

It was then too that Julia gained a friend for the first time. She told her new imaginary friend that she hadn’t had any friends before, and it was sad about that, she thought. She got to play games with someone other than her parents for the first time, all the better because her parents had both gotten much busier, brushing her off when she tried to talk to them for longer than a few minutes. 

Julia learned how to play chess in the dark, her small fingers feeling the pieces, the white pieces glowing in the tiniest bit of moonlight, and she got good at it. Her parents never had the patience to teach her anyway, but her new friend did. It listened to her whispering until her voice grew hoarse, never cutting her off or teasing her like the kids at school would. 

It even seemed to get mad on her behalf! Months into this new friendship cultivated from sporadic nighttime visits, Julia mentioned how some boys at school had decided to cut her hair with safety scissors one day, when she had fallen asleep in class after a long night talking to her friend. 

The boy who did it never returned to school, but Julia never made the connection, never knew that the little boy had gone wandering into the darkness and never came back.

These things continued for years. The parents of the Montauk household were secretly killing Linette’s fellow cultists, enacting a long ritual to banish the monster that stalked their home, one they believed was gaining strength to fully attack their family. The child grew and played games with said monster, some days even as bold as to stay in her room and close her curtains and talk to her friend when the sun still shined.

Julia knew her parents were hiding something, and for years she let it slide, knowing that it was likely something gross like kissing, or they just didn’t want her to mess up whatever project they were doing. One of the girls in her year said she wasn’t allowed to go in her father’s office, because he made dorky models of ships and planes. It was probably something like that, she reasoned, age ten and gradually becoming disillusioned with the world as she aged.

She let herself believe her father still had a job.

Julia grew up, though, and realized she hadn’t really had parents for years now. The only time she wasn’t afraid was when she was with her guardian, the creature made of darkness and nightmares, who cared about her. Parents were supposed to care about a child, they were supposed to do things without complaining about their child wasting their time. They were supposed to remember your birthday and worry when you get sick and pick you up from school.

Linette Montauk had always been obsessive at heart, an easy grab for the cult, someone who dedicated everything to whatever she set her sights on. She had thought she was doing all of this, committing murder and carving up the bodies and dragging her husband into it, in order to protect her family. But in the end she couldn’t help being in awe of the supernatural, always wanting to immerse everything she was into it, until she got scared, and fled her cult. Now she was just as intent, eyes only lighting up when she finally found a new victim. Robert was stressed, and tired, and prone to drink. He was exhausted and felt he deserved the oblivion that a bottle so neatly provided. 

They both assumed the other was caring for Julia, not knowing it was a creature from the very Darkness they were attempting to fend off.

Julia was twelve when the shed had been left open at night, both of her parents exhausted and passed out upstairs on their bed, not bothering to wash the bloodstains from the walls just yet. Her parents assumed she was just sleeping in, becoming a teenager, another excuse to ignore her. But Julia had not needed to sleep in over a year.

She had still been in jeans and a large loose t-shirt when she walked across the garden to the shed, her friend and guardian trailing behind her, impressing upon her the fact that the shed itself was dangerous for it, and it would have to stay back. 

Julia saw a dead body for the first time that night, and it scared her so badly that she fainted, too frightened to remember she should scream, and fell unconscious for the first time in a year.

When Julia Montauk woke up she was alone in a big church. All the pews were gone, and there was just the stand at the front and the boarded over stained glass windows. If she hadn’t been able to see in the dark for years now, it likely would’ve been pitch black.

She was on the ground, wrapped in her favorite blanket, with her stuffed dog in her arms. She did not remember how she got here, except that she had a reason to be very very afraid. Julia scanned around the large hall, pulling at her blanket and leaving it just around her shoulders like a cape, clinging to her stuffed animal even though she was probably a bit too old to do that.  
The shadows were heavier here, bigger and stronger with more things like her guardian. She could feel them pulling, a tide that constantly pushed and pulled, testing her and how well she could resist when she too was born of the sun’s children, of a nonbeliever who fled The Dark out of fear. Julia knew all of this and faced it, quiet, unobtrusive, sliding between what is and isn’t as she sought out her friend.

When she found it she appeared again, in the clearing in front of the church, and she was simply there, avoiding the moonlit portions, the light and dark in this place of power more like oil and water than normal.

There were two faithful avatars of The Dark, both standing in the clearing trying to communicate with a manifested creature who was supposed to have done its duty and disappeared years ago. Rayner was stoic as ever, more adept at communing with this divine creature than Manuela, who was more analytical, trying to perceive what shouldn’t be perceived, still too new to the paranormal to loosen the shackles of scientific academia. 

The monster was annoyed, more prone to emotion with these long years caring for such an emotional little human. It didn’t realize how far along Julia had become, as communicating with Rayner was as if they had no idea what language the other was speaking, only the intentions. 

Then Julia appeared, using one of the tricks it had taught her, and it immediately placed a protective limb in front of her. As it predicted Rayner raised his eyebrows, a predatory interest emanating from the man who so easily transferred his energy into the young for life, while the young woman startled, a sharp gasp wrenched from her.

“Hello.” Julia murmured, leaning into the more solidified form of her friend, who let out a deep vibrating hum to comfort her.

“Hello, Miss Montauk. Last I heard your parents had been causing us quite a bit of trouble.” Rayner’s voice was condescending, annoying. 

Julia silently conveyed this to her friend, who shuddered in as close to laughter as it will ever get.

“Not my parents anymore.” Julia mumbled, voice heard clearly in the silence nonetheless.

“Well, then hello Julia. I’m Manuela.” The woman was smiling, and young.

Julia smiled back, not realizing she was baring her teeth in a way that sent chills down Manuela’s spine. “Hi. Are you people going to help me? I don’t have a place to stay, and I don’t know much, and my guardian said you would if I got in trouble.” 

Manuela looked enthused, though Rayner, as charismatic as most other cult leaders, was obviously exhausted already by the new element he had not accounted for.

“Oh I’m sure we’ll do great things together.” Manuela said. “Now, onto important matters, could you tell me the name of your adorable dog?” 

Julia looked down at her toy and giggled. “Fredrick, of course.”

Manuela began questioning Julia more about Fredrick, while the little girl was leaning against an awful creature who typically followed its mission and tore its victims to pieces as opposed to adopting them.

Rayner was not excited by this in the slightest.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me at @save-the-spiral-again on tumblr for TMA reblogs and stuff!


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